Frank Miller’s ‘Hard Boiled’ Movie Back in Development

After The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises dominating the box office last year, comic book adaptations have become pretty hot property in Hollywood (if they weren’t already). Iron Man 3 has already outdone both previous instalments in the franchise with a take that’s approaching $1 billion, and Man of Steel is already a favorite to become this year’s biggest summer blockbuster.

But will other, less family-friendly comic book adaptations see the same rate of success? Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s Deadpool movie is struggling to obtain a green light, despite the fact that Ryan Reynolds is attached to play the lead, and Twentieth Century Fox’s Daredevil reboot eventually fizzled out altogether, after both David Slade and Joe Carnahan attempted to pitch a darker, gritter, more violent version of the superhero’s story.

Mukunda Michael Dewil, the South African director of Vehicle 19, a new car chase movie featuring Paul Walker, recently spoke to Bleeding Cool about some upcoming projects that he’s working on, and revealed that he’s collaborating with Stephen L’Heureux (the producer of Frank Miller’s forthcoming sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For) on an adaptation of Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s gory sci-fi comic, Hard Boiled.

I’m adapting Frank Miller’s comic book called Hard Boiled with Stephen L’Heureux from Solipsist films. They just did Sin City 2 and they own a lot of Frank’s comics. That’s a very big project that’s going be out to market in a couple of weeks… it’s quite a big deal. We’re kind of pumped for that.

Hard Boiled is a three-issue comic miniseries, first published in the early ’90s, about a cyborg tax collector called Nixon, who is brainwashed into believing that he is a human insurance investigator with a wife and two kids. When Nixon gets his wires crossed and remembers his true identity, he has a tendency to go on homicidal rampages through futuristic Hollywood that end up with body counts in the hundreds. After one such occasion, Nixon finds himself unwittingly embroiled in an underground cyborg revolution. Imagine something between The Truman Show and Blade Runner and you’ll be halfway there.

The comics are full of Miller’s trademark gratuitous violence and dark humor, and the content would be incredibly difficult to tame into anything less than an R-rating. The last time the project seemed to be in in the works, Miller himself was determined to direct it, and since Stephen L’Heureux has contacted Bleeding Cool to say that no director is attached yet, it’s possible that Miller might end up getting behind the camera for this one.

All that, of course, is dependent on whether or not Hard Boiled makes it all the way to production this time, which is dependent on how well Solipsist Films does pitching it to financiers. Back in 2001, Warner Bros was planning an adaptation with David Fincher set to direct and – brace yourselves – Nicolas Cage as Nixon the homicidal cyborg. Is it too late to get that version made?

There’s no release date yet for Hard Boiled, but we’ll let you know if the project gains any more traction.